Governments with money centralise and claim the credit.

Governments without cash decentralise and spread the blame.

Those are not the views of a hardened media cynic. They are what I was told by one of the Tories' top policy wonks before the election.

 

Today Eric Pickles will take money - lots and lots of money - away from local councils. He will, at the same time, promise them new freedoms to reorganise themselves and their services. The second will be regarded by many as good in itself but be in no doubt that it is connected inextricably to the first.

Pickles wants - as a matter of long-term belief as well as short-term political convenience - local people to hold local councils to account for what they spend. That is why he has highlighted the pay of council chief executives. That is why he has attacked council newsletters so as to protect and promote a vigorous local press to look for and criticise council waste. That is why he pursues populist attacks on council "absurdities" like staging Winterval instead of Christmas celebrations.

Deep council cuts are coming. The political question is who do people blame - the coalition, the minister or the council?

It's worth remembering today that the communities and local government secretary has spent his life studying how to get his way in politics. He is, these days, widely regarded as being on the Tory right. However, for his 14th birthday, Pickles - then an ardent left winger - received Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution as a present and learned a great deal from the master of political organisation. As a young man, when he was chairman of the National Young Conservatives and the Joint Committee against Racism, he was a Tory "Wet" who took on Margaret Thatcher on the issue of unemployment and racism in northern cities. As leader of Bradford City Council in the late 80s, the "right wing" Pickles emerged to announce a five-year plan to cut the council's budget by £50m, reducing the workforce by a thrd, privatise services and undertake council departmental restructuring.

Pickles is, in short, no pushover.

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The Commons may have voted for higher tuition fees in England tonight but the debate on student finance is far from over. The Lords has yet to have its say. What's more the Commons vote was only about the level of fees and not the income at which they're paid back, the interest rate charged or the assistance given to poorer students. Legislation on that will come in the New Year and is sure to face rebellions in both Houses.

Some, of course, may conclude that a change of government is needed to end fees. Interesting then that tonight Ed Miliband was careful not to make that promise and to say instead that he had learnt from the mistakes made by the Liberal Democrats.

PS. The final voting figures show that 21 Lib Dems voted no to higher fees and five actively abstained (three were out of the country). Meantime six Tories voted no and two abstained. Ministers point out that the margin of victory tonight is four times the one Tony Blair got when he introduced fees in 2003 and that the Labour working majority back then was almost double that of the coalition.

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Government sources are sounding confident about tonight's vote. One just claimed that 21 Lib Dem MPs would vote against higher fees and five would abstain. They expected four or five Tories to vote no and around the same number to abstain.

That would - if correct - give the government a majority in the low 20s.

Update 1747: Three-quarters knocked off the government's majority... the biggest Lib Dem rebellion since the party was formed... a coalition with a healthy majority having to haggle, woo, persuade to get its policy as the streets around Westminster were filled with angry protesters.

This will come as a relief to the coalition but also a warning of what could lie ahead.

The House voted for both measures - raising the cap to £6,000 and up to £9,000 in exceptional circumstances - by 323 votes to 302.

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